Global warming is fueling the growth of plants, which means that allergy sufferers can expect more pollen, and in turn more sneezing and red, itchy eyes, according to a new report by CBS News.

Warming global temperatures mean “another tough season for allergy sufferers,” CBS warns, as “warm weather is arriving up to 20 days earlier this year in some places.”

In recent years, “climate change” has been blamed for myriad ills, including everything from a slump in coffee production to devastating hurricanes to a drop in the population of Hawaiian monk seals to the decimation of migratory songbirds and even colder winters.

Now, thanks to CBS, we know that peoples’ allergies would not be nearly as bad if fewer people drove SUVs.

“The climate and the weather has an impact on the start, the duration, and the intensity of allergy season,” Dr. Tara Narula told CBS This Morning on Friday. “With global warming, we know last year was one of the hottest on record, as well as increased carbon dioxide emissions. This all fuels the growth of plants, which means more pollen, earlier pollen, and pollen that stays around longer,” she added.

Dr. Tara Narula even went so far as to predict the concentration of pollen grains per cubic meter of air in the year 2040. Her answer? “Around 20,000.”

“So about two weeks before the season starts you want to start taking either your over-the-counter meds or your prescription meds,” she said. “There are things like allergy shots and now sublingual medicines that you can take, immunotherapy.”

Anthropogenic climate change—the idea that human emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are significantly driving global temperatures upwards—has become the convenient scapegoat for problems ranging from the mass deaths of reindeer to the creation of “ghost forests” along the U.S. Atlantic seaboard.

“I think ghost forests are the most obvious indicator of climate change anywhere on the Eastern coast of the U.S.,” said Matthew Kirwan, a professor at Virginia Institute of Marine Science who studies ghost forests. “It was dry, usable land 50 years ago; now it’s marshes with dead stumps and dead trees.”

A refreshingly sober essay by John Horgan in Scientific American last month counseled readers to “chill out” over the apocalyptic scenarios drawn up by climate change prophets of doom.

Horgan, the director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology, explored two recent reports by “ecomodernists” who reject climate panic and frame the question of climate change and humanity’s ability to cope with it in radically new terms.

The reports urged people to reject climate “fatalism” and to regain some much-needed perspective on climate, both in the context of the overwhelming benefits of industrialization and in the ability of humanity to solve far worse problems than climate change.

In the meantime, you may want to stockpile your Allegra, Nasacort, and Neo-Synephrine. You never know when climate change will strike.

Global warming fuels the growth of plants. Agreed. More plants means more CO2 extracted from the atmosphere which means less greenhouse gas warming effect which leads to global cooling which means fewer plants grow… I thinks it’s called a damping feedback effect. That’s why the earth’s climate is so stable over the millenia.

The death of migratory songbirds…
I know that locally we’ve seen no death or even dearth of the Song Bird population. In fact, the first nesting has recently fledged and flight schools are in session. We have a plethora of little winged creatures flitting from rooftop to bush and back again. They just love, love, love the worm weather.
(and yes I did mean Worm Weather not Warm Weather though they love the Warm weather too)

The Day of the Triffids? OMG … how I miss all of those corny B-movies so popular in the 1950’s and 60’s. Some of my other favourites are Night of the Lepus, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. So much kitsch, but so good — especially when compared to some of today’s viewing fare.

NASA has reported on the greening of the Earth, so it makes sense, more plants, more pollen.

Side note – I used to have terrible allergies in the spring and summer, I did some reading and started eating bee pollen. The theory being; you are immunizing yourself by eating the very pollen that is affecting you. I can’t prove it worked but I don’t have allergies anymore. You can buy bee pollen or you can eat raw, unfiltered honey and also get pollen.

“We are living through an all-out war on truth, facts and reason,” Clinton said at the PEN America World Voices Festival, in Manhattan. “When leaders deny things we can see with our own eyes, like the size of a crowd at the inauguration, when they refuse to accept settled science when it comes to urgent challenges like climate change ..

Tom, that is indeed the dumbest story I have heard in a long time. Maybe the university is afraid that their snow flakes have spent so much time indoors or in safe zones that they can’t adapt, even with training, to being outdoors. Or if they got a tick on them they would panic and jump off a cliff.

Over the past twenty years, global warming in the real world has stalled out. So it may no longer be fostering more green growth.
However, the increase in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is stimulating a noteworthy increase in plant growth.

Every generation wants to believe they live in exceptional times, with the implicit assertion that coping thus makes them (us) exceptional by logical extension. Coping with (assumed) increases in allergies is a small part of that larger human psychology.

Sort of like every parent wanting to believe their child is above average. (The Lake Wobegon Effect).

It defies rational application of normal statistical distributions. and it also depends greatly on the lack of knowledge (both structural and individual ignorance) about the past.

Furthermore, the hygiene hypothesis does posit that much of modern Western civilization’s allergy epidemics is due to our immune systems not being programmed during childhood to various parhogens (like parasitic helminths) as it was evolved to do. Thus as adults our immune system becomes hyperactive to non-noxious stimuli (pollen, dust mite poop, novel foods).

That’s a big, important subject and related to: Healthy humans have multitudes of different types of bacteria in their intestines. That bacteria is the first line of defense of your immune system. It out-competes bad bacteria that may come along. If you drink chlorinated water all the time or you go on a course of antibiotics you can wipe all that out and that leaves you wide open for any bad bacteria to come in and take over.

So, let me get this straight: Global warming caused by human use of fossil fuel has caused more plants to grow more, which has caused more pollen, which has caused more allergies, which has caused more people to have to stay inside more on warmer days, which will cause more people to use more air conditioning more, which will cause more fossil fuel to be used, which will cause more plants, more pollen, more allergies, more fossil fuel use for air conditioning to stay inside.

I don’t have allergies to pollen. There are others like me. We will survive. The pollen sufferers will gradually die off, leaving fewer, yet stronger, people alive on Earth to use less fossil fuel, to produce less plant growth, to cause less pollen, less potential for pollen allergies.

That photo at the top? It’s a dandelion that has gone to seed. It is not the flowerhead, and the seeds don’t carry any allergens. They, however, so aerodynamic that they can float for miles on the wind and land in your recently weeded yard and sprout offspring in the blink of an eye.
But pollen? Not so much that you’d notice it.

Gary – What you say is generally true, but most dandelions ‘pollinate’ themselves. They are apomicts, but bizarrely, still attract bees. Nature is very strange sometimes. So using a dandelion are a header photo for this article is even more inappropriate than you and Sara note.

Dandelions can be pollinated by insects, but usually pollinate themselves, even between buds, without the flowers forming (as in low sunlight areas). However pollination between different plants is good from the standpoint of genetic health and evolution.

Really scraping the borrom of the silly barrel. Pollen in spring or summer depends on when plants want to reproduce. That ismusually some combination of dalylight and temperature. Daylight wont change, and spring temperate tempuratures depend on weather not climate. In any event, the blooming season per plant type always ends. So earlier, probably not. But longer polen season— no way.

Except when you have one of the coldest starts to spring for most of North America in the 100+ years of data, right? I’m hoping that the ground temperature will be warm enough to transplant summer garden plants by May 5th in a zone where April 20th is typically the latest date you need to worry about the soil being too cold for such plants.

From the AP “indicator” link above–
“The Atlantic croaker fish, for instance, was rare 15 years ago in southern New Jersey waters but now is abundant, said Ken Able, a Rutgers University professor”

Able is a (able) marine fish biologist, he knows more, probably only fits AP narrative. He was not the one researching “ghost forests” indicating they were sloppily pushing crisis mentality. I got a good bit of my education working for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science back when hysteria was recognized as such (circa 1960). This may be related to changing their name from the Virginia Fisheries Laboratory back when they weren’t studying forests. Maybe too close to DC.

I seem to remember a story about crabbers not abandoning Tangier despite the rise. Besides ghost forests they also sponsor ghost (skeleton) fish on Google Earth (check oceans box). I also saw ghost forests on the Chesapeake, possibly subsidence. Just saw a ‘ghost forest’ of cattail marsh killed by Hurricane Harvey salt water.

Drinkwater, K. F. 2006. The regime shift of the 1920s and 30s in the North Atlantic. Journal of Marine Systems. 68(2-4):134-151. Rediscovery in part of older work– one of many–Sutcliffe, W. H., Jr., K. Drinkwater and B. S. Muir. 1977. Correlations of fish catch and environmental factors in the Gulf of Maine. Journal Fisheries Research Board Canada. 34:19-30.

Warm core water rings with southern fish larvae break off the Gulf Stream and move toward shore. Currents come from the north bringing strange critters (like lobster) to Virginia. Might be this year. “These show a long warming period from the 1920s to the 1950s followed by a cooling period ….. followed again by a warming period.” Loss of tribal memory?

Regarding the Atlantic Croaker. I moved to the Maryland region of Chesapeake Bay in 1985. At the time, the croaker was unheard of in our area, although old timers remembered them as being abundant. A few years later a few showed up, then more every year until they were extremely abundant. Then, largely inexplicably, the numbers started to decline again until they are now fairly rare (although not absent). History shows this cycle has happened several times. AMO maybe?

As far as the eastern shore islands like Smith and Tangier, the salt marsh on them will keep up with the current level of sea level rise, if allowed to grow unmolested (people burn them or pave them sometimes, in which case they can’t grow upwards). The islands are dying from erosion at the edges. The soft sod formed by rotting salt marsh is too soft to resist the waves very long. Ghost forests form mostly where the drainage is stopped by man, or beavers (which are returning), although at 3 mm a year, the bay will eventually claim low lying areas.

I no longer have the book or journal articles to quote you. However I knew commercial and sports fishermen that fish the Mid-Atlantic area from as far back as the early 1920s. Atlantic croaker, weakfish, striped bass, and bluefish apparently have always been cyclic. Their cycles are sometimes inversely related, one very abundant when others are not. Bluefish in the late 1970s and 1980s were extremely abundant. All time records were set during that period. It was believed because striped bass and weakfish (and a lesser extent Spanish mackerel) were overfished so bluefish had no competitors. What causes the variations in abundance besides overfishing has been speculated but I don’t remember ever seeing a good hypothesis. Probably variation in recruitment due to prevailing climatic conditions play a part.

Blaming humans is older than we know, sometimes even correct. Karl Möbius (1877) who gets credit for the biocoenosis concept giving rise to ecosystem, remarked on the overfishing of European oysters replaced by cockles and mussels. He said oysters could not come back until the nourishment taken by these was again available. Cod fishery with old records shows cycles. Nothing new except in the important details.

Striped bass are anadromous and more subject to freshwater problems, old paper by Mansueti as I recall. They don’t do well in turbid water. Lots of complications, easier to scapegoat. Interesting paper out about oyster reefs doing well or better with rising sea levels. Rodriguez, A. B.,et al., 2014. Oyster reefs can outpace sea-level rise. Nature Climate Change. 4:493- 497.

Where I grew up – Morris, Minnesota – we had a small ghost forest. During the dust bowl era a lake dried up, and trees grew where it once was. Then the dust bowl went away, and the lake returned. There were dead trees everywhere in that lake, until a friend of mine decided they were ugly and rooted them out. But that was before we went and changed the climate. Do we have to pay reparations anyway?

Uh, I am allergic to virtually all airborne allergens. I live in SW CT, and have all my life except schooling. First, Spring is way late here. and news from VT ski areas last week is that it still is winter up there. Second is that I have been on immunotherapy for most of my life and will be on it for the rest of my life due to associated asthma. So I know my nose. I know the seasons well. There is not much new under the Sun that impacts allergies. It varies year to year, but in my experience only weather impacts it each year, not climate whatever. But there is a human impact. We have more deer due to human impact. We have more variety of plants due to human imports of plants from other places (really dumb!) And we have less understory and variety due to deer eating it all. So yes, a human impact, but not a climate whatever. Best to all who read this. H

Ok, well here in Minnesota they said it’s the coldest start to April since records began, so the pollen here is pretty low now, but the plants look like Popeye ready to burst from all of that CO2 they’ve been absorbing. I’m gonna go get some Nasacort….

This is a no-brainer. The dominate factor here is the increase in CO2. We are just just now entering the healthy zones for most plant species and they are responding with much higher growth rates and much increased seed and pollen production. The plant kingdom is thriving, but unfortunately we humans now have to adapt as well. One the plus side, our food production is thriving as well.

The term “climate change” is semantically empty.
Anyone who uses it, like the CBS folk, are intellectually content free.
….”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone,
……“it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
We have 300,000 years of genetic and behavioral selection:
…using ambiguous phraseology is simple minded.

Funny thing is, here in Norway spring is generally a couple of weeks earlier now than it used to be during the frigid seventies. And with that earlier spring, the pollen season has been stretched out more than before, it starts earlier but it is less intense and lasting longer.

This year is different. Because of the colder winter we had, with more snow cover later into spring, we are now ‘enjoying’ nature coming back to life – right now, all over, in a very short period of time. Pollen is intense now, and allergics are suffering more.

I am particulalry allergic to dandelion pollen. Luckily, the dandelion blossoming has come in parallell with cold weather the last 6-7 years, which means pollen has been less and the air has been cleaned by frequent showers. It will be interesting to see what happens this year.

On the greening side of things, Norway is much ‘greener’ now than 40 years ago. It is certainly due to CO2 fertilization, but also due to the fact that grazing animals are a lot fewer and further between. Mountain roads that used to have tremendous views are now grown in by dense vegetation.

I have attempted to explain the immunological cause of increase of allergies and other western diseases such as autism, cardiovascular disease, and depression in my recently published book ‘The Kindness of Human Milk’. http://myBook.to/TheKindness I think this may add another perspective to the issues discussed.

John Horgan’s essay in no way addresses the allergy prediction made in the CBS News story. It’s just states that mankind has adapted to problems through technology in the past, and that will continue. I’m not sure how that same thinking can be applied to increased allergy problems.

What type of climate change is doing that.
Is it higher temperatures, lower temperatures, more rain, less rain, more wind or less wind, more sunshine or less, more winter snow or less.
If you notice some changes and only to the worse, blame it on CLIMATE CHANGE.
Have you ever heard that some good was coused by climate change?

I think this is an example, and I’ve seen a few of them lately, of an anti-alarmist paper in disguise. I think a lot of scientists are finally coming around to our side (the skeptical side) of the debate, but realize they can’t get skeptical papers published because most of the journal editors are alarmists (and the ones that aren’t won’t be around long thanks to targeting by alarmists, as revealed in the ClimateGate emails). Or worse, they might lose their jobs if they “come out” as skeptics. So they try to find some result of global warming that is, on the surface, a bad thing, but if you dig just below the surface, you find that there’s something even bigger, on the good side. In this case, the “bad” thing, the thing that got the article past the gatekeepers, was the increase in allergens. But of course, for there to be more allergens, there has to be more plants (which the author mentioned in passing, but didn’t explore in its own right), and if there are more plants, that will reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, thus acting as a negative feedback to warming (which the author, I assume, didn’t mention at all, but anyone with half a brain can figure out.)

What remains to be seen is whether these skeptical papers disguised as alarmist papers are just individual scientists trying to keep their positions (“publish or perish”), or part of a growing counter-conspiracy to gradually destroy the CAGW conspiracy from the inside.